Lessons Learned With Second Languages

I have recently enjoyed some substantial success in applying myself to the reading of French, as a Second Language. While I can’t read French with the same speed and not yet with the same discernment with which I can read English, still, I have arrived at the point where I can read French Literature for the fun of it. I think I have even got to the point of telling a decently turned phrase when I see one… or at least of being able to come to such an opinion.

It took a lot of work, learning to read a second language, but it is work one begins to enjoy. Because reading French had started to become, well, effortless, and since I had been delighted to take the effort, I have decided to start learning to read German, so I can go back to the hard work again that I love so much. But I doubt that it will be as difficult as French was. You know, they say a Third Language comes much easier, if for no other reason than knowing where to begin. First I know that verbs must be attacked right off. When I first started with French it concerned me that I could not find almost any words in the dictionaries. Well, of course not, because I was being fooled by the funny looking conjugated verbs that do not appear in the basic pages of the dictionaries but only in the verb tables in the very back… and only if one is lucky enough to have bought a dictionary that includes verb tables, as not all of them do. With German I know straight off to learn what the basic infinitive verbs will probably look like up against all the various tense forms.

And then there are the practical issues – what to buy and where to buy it from. I was once hard pressed to guess where on earth I could possibly buy books in French. Then it finally occurred to me to type in ‘Amazon.fr’ and see where that would get me. France! It was like I was miraculously transported to another Planet! I could buy books directly from France. Who would have guessed it could be that easy. Now with German, there is no mystery. Amazon.de. Oh, and one’s accounts and passwords carry over from country to country and the credit cards continue to work fine and dandy.

Now, there are some hard lessons that I think I have learned… some mistakes that I may not wish to repeat. Mostly, I think I started out by making way too many 3 by 5 cards. There can be way too much of a good thing. It had become an obsession. I would spend my weekends generating more and more new cards. At my peek I was creating 300 new cards each week. From reference books, dictionaries, Movie subtitles (yes, most DVD’s have French Subtitles in their Language Choices, so one may listen in English but read in French). Well, of course, 300 cards is way too many to digest before the next weekend generates 300 more. At one time I had a rack of more than 2000 active cards, and a bucket behind my desk with 2000 more I was meaning to get back to. I would pocket about 100 cards at a time to carry on my person, and go through them over and over, placing comfortably known cards to the back of the deck and the tricky cards toward the front in order to see them again sooner, to get another chance with them earlier on. When I would finish with a deck of cards, it would go to the back of the stack and I would take new cards from the front. Eventually the cards I already studied would come around again to the front. But there were so MANY cards over all, that the ‘known’ cards would seem exactly the same as the very new cards. By the time I got through a full rotation, I would have forgotten the most of the cards. I simply was not getting in enough timely repetition. Probably the optimum number of cards should allow one to cycle through and repeat several times a week, so that the review would be reinforcing, not giving oneself enough time to totally forget a word or phrase before one goes over it again, and then again. So, now, during my weekends, I try to divide my time better between making new cards and flipping through and learning the old ones. I try not to add more than 50 new cards to the stack each week.

Then, there is the question of how long one should keep a card in the stack. If kept forever, one would soon enough be buried in cards. With 20,000 words in a language (and that’s modest, with some dictionaries claiming 40,000 or even 80.000 entries), and then multiply that by usages and colloquialisms, one would need to keep a separate room for all the cards. And, as I have said, one would not have time to root through all of them anyway… not to any lasting advantage. So, from my experience so far, I’m thinking that each card should have a lifespan of not more than several months. One finds that one might try to reward one’s vanity by keeping cards that one really knows rather well – one wants to congratulate oneself for knowing this or that as it comes up, but at a certain point one needs to make room for new cards – cards that will do their proper job of making one feel stupidly ignorant again. Also there is the matter of the old cards becoming familiar simply as old cards, that is, one does not know the word or phrase so much as one simply knows the card itself… if the cards are allowed to stay on too long, one simply grows used to the poor old dog-eared things, and one hardly sees what they have to say on their front before knowing from perhaps a coffee stain what is on the back. Such a card is no longer really doing a thing for you except taking up brain space and should be retired to the trash bins. As I have said, one needs to be able to go through ALL of one’s cards several times a week, for the optimum amount of repetition. So you can’t keep a lot of old cards laying around. If you make 50 new cards a week, then you really need to toss 50 cards also.

Yes, I know that there are arguments for keeping cards on for practically forever – that without a word or phrase in the card rotation, one may in time forget it. Yes, it in fact does happen that in the course of one’s reading that one will look up a word only to be reminded by its definition that it was once a ‘card’ word… that one had forgotten it. Is that disappointing? Yes. But is it tragic? NO! On should realize that at least one recognized the word upon looking it up, and that in itself shows some degree of familiarity. So just write out a new card… include the word in a phrase to make it different this time around. A word might go through the decks in two or three different incarnations before it becomes part of your solid lasting vocabulary. Besides, cards are cheap and writing the cards improves spelling skills and penmanship. Oh, and now that I am starting with German, I can testify that there is a great difference between totally new words and words which one has encountered before and subsequently ‘forgotten’. Words encountered before come back so much easier, and nothing is really ever totally forgotten. These new German words, on the other hand… well, I simply must remember when French had been that hard. It’s only a temporary problem.

Oh, there is more to experience than citing problems I have had and mistakes I have made. There were things that I think I had actually done quite well, indeed, very well. Call it beginners luck. I had been admirably systematic. I had gotten CD’s to play while driving in my car. Simple grammar is taught painlessly and one learns pronunciation. Michel Thomas has the best programs (entertaining and even fun) and I think he teaches every language there is, except maybe Mandarin. Then I got various Lesson Books, you know, those “How To Speak French” or whatever books. Again, this gives one exposure to necessary grammar and verb conjugation. Now, don’t make the mistake of supposing that you can read for comprehension while blowing off the need for learning the grammatical rules… thinking that you will pick up the sense by some kind of intuition. All those tenses, modes and what-ever-you-call-them carry substantial meaning that are not conveyed by the words themselves, that one would know offhand, but only by their grammatical presentation. You really need to know what the funny little endings mean, and then everything will make much more sense. And you need not plod along in rote memorization, but simply know enough to know where to look when in doubt. Soon enough you will know what you need to know with little loss of time and surprisingly little pain.

I began my reading with books of the sort called “Easy Readers”, and they come with vocabulary listings, but sometimes fall down in not providing translations of what the editors probably thought was obvious, but which a new student might still have doubts about. Easy is never really Easy enough. But the Easy Readers are a good source for start up vocabulary. These are the words you will see again and again, so there is no sense moving on to High Literature until you can read “Baby’s First French Book” or whatever, without too much stumbling.

Then there are the Dual Language Books, which are convenient in their own way, but there are not many of them available… and the choices are, well, a matter of taste. They also suffer from problems of translation. Now, how to explain that? Sometimes people come up to me and ask, “how does one say such and such a thing in French”, and the answer is often “Well, they wouldn’t.” That is, what is literally said in one language is often not what is literally said in another – colloquial phrases and figurative usages are simply different. Different languages communicate differently. Its not just different words, but different concepts, images, metaphors. So you will find that almost every translation you encounter will go way beyond translating word for word, but will convert to concepts and expressions familiar in the target language. So a ‘translation’ may be of limited utility in understanding the word by word presentation in a Second Language. What we find in the Dual Language Books, and indeed in almost any ‘Translation’ is that we get a sense for the details of the story and that is about it. But that may be a great deal better than nothing! As long as paperbacks only cost a few dollars, I still make it a point to have a ‘cheater’ translation lying around when reading a foreign language book, just in case some strange colloquialism throws me entirely off the track. Oh, and thinking back to the beginning, when the grammar was still so strange that it was entirely likely that one could mix up subject and object, and not know whether somebody was doing or being done to, then even a loose translation could straighten out such a misunderstanding.

Anyway, while Dual Language Books can be worthwhile, one should consider that one can arrive at the same benefits, simply by finding books that are published in both languages. Then you have a much larger choice of books! It may take awhile, but one can bring up both Amazon.com and Amazon.fr or .de or whatever and keep digging until one finds a book published in both languages. Now, I have encountered problems with modern books where the titles are rendered so fancifully that it is not easily guessed, from one language to the next, whether one is looking at the same book (Harlan Corbin and Lee Child are published in many languages, but the Publishers make up the titles for how sexy they sound and not for their similarity in meaning to the English Title). But one can find Websites put together for or by the fans, and going to the discussion forums you can simply ask the question, what the French Title is for a certain English Title, giving them a list of possible choices, and some busy-bee of a person is always willing to research it out for you. Sometimes one gets lucky. “Echo Park” in English is “Echo Park” in French. With fine literature and well known books the Titles are very close to literal. “The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler is “Le Grand Sommeil” in French. “Wuthering Heights”is “Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent”. Oh, some translations are actually abridgments, without saying so. But every cheater copy I have ever had was worth having around. But, again, translations only go so far and you can count on doing a lot of the hard reading yourself.

Now, here’s a hard-earned piece of advice: once one starts one’s reading, after the sufficient preparations suggested earlier, one must assume that anything that seems odd, strange or somehow puzzling in its meaning is probably figurative or colloquial. Every language will have funny and idiosyncratic ways of saying some things… strange ways to express some ideas. Its in the nature of the Beast we call Language. Most good dictionaries will embed within their definitions the most common colloquialisms where certain words are used. But this requires a fairly decent dictionary. The most basic English French Dictionary will not show every usage. Now some dictionaries are better than others. Look for dictionaries that include phrases. I had been rescued time and time again by Merriam Webster’s French English Dictionary and was sad to find they did not publish an English German edition. The Country’s own Dictionary – their Single Language Dictionary, will be more complete in listing usages and colloquialisms. So, as soon as it becomes possible one should graduate to a One Language Dictionary – NOT the biggest one in the Language, as they are very expensive, very heavy and awkward, and one gets TOO Much Information and each words takes forever to go through (important little words can take up pages), but a good Medium Size Dictionary will have what you need and be easier to use. What a One Language Dictionary will do for you is provide you with a context of other words in the language you want to be learning. But go to a One Language Dictionary too soon, and it will be largely meaningless, forcing you to chase from one word to another in a circular hunt for definition which could almost seem to go on forever. But after you have gone through 500 to a thousand pages of reading with a Dual Language Dictionary, you should have enough command of the most commonly used words to understand a One Language Dictionary definition without excessive ‘dictionary chasing’—some of which is even useful.

The best reference materials are a wonderful aid and a great convenience. But they may rate perhaps only as a distant second behind your tenacity to know. When a passage seems confusing and it simply does not sound right against what you think it must mean, then you have a problem – a colloquialism, or a word or a grammar point you have somehow confused. These are the passages that try men’s souls! You really need to stay with these sentences or phrases until you figure them out. Starting a habit of skipping passages one does not fully understand … well, I have often wondered how it is that people could possibly do badly in a reading comprehension test. You read a paragraph. You answer the questions. What is hard about that? Well, the problem is that some people began the habit of skipping over what they read. So, don’t skip. Don’t move on until it makes sense to you.

Oh, those who are planning to begin reading in a foreign language may be wondering how much one should read before one can expect to be reasonably proficient. Well, assuming that everybody learns at the same rate, there is the matter of how much it takes before one has really seen a good representation of the language, and that may take several thousand pages, maybe four or five big thumping books. You see, many words, not just the big ostentatious words, are not used in the course of just one book. The same goes for grammatical constructions. You may have to read for quite some time before one has effectively ‘seen it all’ or even seen most of it. For instance, in the grammar books for French I was taught that I would see a puzzling construction consisting of a form of ‘avoir’(to have), combined with ‘beau’ (good or beautiful), and that it would be used in a manner that would have a parallel meaning with “despite doing good, something bad happened”, or “despite best efforts, failure occurred”. Okay, I was ready for “avoir beau”. But I never saw it. I finished book after book. Not until just shy of having read 2000 pages did I finally encounter “I HAD searched BEAU the entire district, and still nobody would rent me a room”. Of course, thank God, I knew it when I saw it. I honestly gasped! One gets a warm fuzzy rewarding feeling inside when one finally encounters in print some word or construction one had bothered to study and then was waiting to finally see out in the real literary world, like a rare and elusive butterfly. Anyway, my guess is that if one divides one’s time well between literary and modern books, to see a good representation of the language, then 4 or 5 books ought to get one through the difficult period in which one seems to always be slowed down in looking up new vocabulary and running down colloquialisms.

Oh, some people may be wondering what their incentive could possibly be for learning to read in a second language. Well, there are several very good reasons. Firstly, if one is a scholar or concerned with World Affairs, then one really needs to go beyond English to escape from the prejudices, even the propagandas of the English Speaking World – the language of George Bush and his poodledog Prime Ministers – the language of the Unilateral Protestant Empire and the one Country of Europe that fights against every Collective Decision. One must face the fact that the English Speaking World has some peculiar notions, when considered from the point of view of Everybody Else. Other cultures have other viewpoints, and these viewpoints are expressed in other Languages, and one can never entirely count upon translations. And many books are not translated. Magazines, and newspapers are not translated. Then there is the matter of enjoyment of literature. Frankly I read all of English Literature… at least looking at everything to see if I would like it. After having finished it all, my choice was to go back over and re-read my favorites, AGAIN, or pick up another language and move onto a New Field of Literature. Oh, yes, there is Modern Fiction, but, honestly, who wants to waste one’s time with such absolute rubbish, when reading another Culture’s Fine Literature is not really all that difficult. If one is attracted to foreign authors or foreign philosophers, realize that you are only tagging on another year or two of time and trouble so that you can read it all in the Original. Isn’t that worth it? If you will live to be 60, 70 or 80, then don’t you really have the time, especially if you are still young?

Also, I should mention that by learning second and third languages, one becomes much more attuned to the play and dynamics of language in general – of English! My writing has improved as well as my appreciation of writing styles. It gives one more to think about, and thinking is never entirely bad.

So go for it. Pick a Second Language and get to work. Let me know if I can help.